A collection of automotive stuff, restaurant/travel-related items and personal observations; mostly a lot of claptrap, really.

Nashville

Taken a few years ago at some joint on Broadway in Nashville, this was one of several photos with good-looking girls I had never laid eyes on before. It wasn't my birthday, but the Nissan crew was telling every attractive female we encountered that it was. Here's to getting older!

Friday, April 29, 2016

I'm not the kind of guy who sleeps the
day away. Typically my feet hit the floor somewhere between 6:30 and
7:30 a.m. I only use an alarm clock when I have to catch a flight
that, just as often as not, involves a two-and-a-half-hour slog to
Atlanta.

Some mornings I wake before 6:30, and
love getting that head start on the day. I'm what my hater friends
refer to as a “morning person.” It's a term they usually spit out
with the same disdain as “Nazi” or “hedge-fund manager.”
Here's the deal, though, I'm at my best before noon. Once I've eaten
lunch – no matter what it might be – I'm ready to coast to the
finish line. Sure, I might drag myself to the gym or toil away for a
couple of hours on some renovation project, but my enthusiasm for any
post-lunch undertaking is utterly nil, as my inner slacker rears its
ugly head.

I can't put into words just how rare it
is for me to sleep beyond 7:30, regardless of what time I arrived in
bed, or of what the previous evening consisted. If I go to bed at
10:30 or midnight, my eyes pop open between 6:30 and 7:30 (or
earlier), just the same.

Imagine my surprise when I opened my
eyes this morning to my digital clock announcing that it was 9:15!
What! Yep, I merrily snoozed my way nearly two hours beyond 7:30,
stranding me in uncharted waters. Even more amazing, my cat, that is
usually meowing at my door by 7:30, demanding her breakfast, chose
this morning to sleep in, as well.

A bit of wine and a 2 a.m. bedtime were
the culprits in this tale of sloth. A buddy of mine invited me to
dinner last night while his wife hosted a girls' night at home. He
Ubered to the restaurant; so, I dropped him at his house on the way
home. He invited me in for a nightcap. It would have been rude of me
to decline, right? His wife was still entertaining one of her gal
pals poolside. My one nightcap glass of wine turned into a three-hour
gabfest. And the rest, as they say, is history.

What I've garnered from this experience
is, dragging myself out of bed nearly two hours behind my typical
schedule really shortens my day. I mean, significantly so. It's not
so much the two hours of peak productivity lost, but the realization
that I didn't have the time to accomplish much of anything before
lunch that weighed on me like an anvil. Such a profound inertia overcame me that I can barely function.

Wallowing in my ignorance yesterday, I
had made grandiose plans to work on my home's backdoor today. I
haven't attempted to open it in two or three years. As the house
continues to settle, it jammed shut. After forcing it open, I need to
shave some of the wood from the door frame. I figured it would be a
two- or three-hour job. It's just another task requiring my attention
as I try to get this joint into some sort of shape to sell.

However, after addressing the usual
load of overnight e-mails, I glanced at the clock only to discover
that it was after 11 a.m. Realizing my day was already nearly half
gone simply sucked all the initiative right out of me. By the time I
finish this post, it will be time for lunch.

I am so crestfallen over the lost
morning, I can't motivate myself to tackle a project of any sort. I
have two Autotrader assignments that require cranking out over the
next few days; as well as, my backdoor project and a couple of
renovation projects around the house that are in need of completion.
I won't address any of them today. I can't.

I have two episodes remaining of the
most recent season of “Walking Dead” that I recorded in its
entirety and have been binge watching this week. I think this is the
ideal afternoon to get those behind me as I mentally repeat the
slacker mantra: Tomorrow is another day.

Monday, April 11, 2016

I'm not the kind of guy who sniffs at
another opportunity to visit San Diego, despite returning there three
or four times a year. Although some of the same elements of life in
this area, such as cost of living, would discourage me from ever
moving there, as they were key in my moving out of South Florida, I
still love to visit San Diego. What's not to like?

When I learned a few weeks before the
event that Kia had chosen San Diego as the site to introduce the
redesigned 2017 Sportage to the auto media, I didn't immediately
begin tossing stuff in my bag; but I did find and dust off my old,
smaller rollerboard to take along for beer. San Diego is arguably the
craft-beer Mecca of the U.S. – a key reason I love to visit. I knew
I would be bringing back a stash of 22-ounce bottles of some
unavailable-back-East beers. Like the good Scout that I am, I was
going to be prepared.

I was fired up about a first drive of
the renovated Sportage. As Kia's longest-running nameplate, this
fourth-gen Sportage will have a major impact on the brand. Sportage
is among the 40 percent of Kia products sold in the U.S. that are
assembled in the U.S. It's an important piece in Kia's North American
product strategy.

Kia's choice of a venue to host the
three-day, two-night Sportage confab was also reason for my
Christmas-morning level of excitement. Home for those three days
would be San Diego's Hard Rock Hotel. Never having stayed in a Hard
Rock, I was elated to finally sample that experience. Doubling down
on the allure of the accommodations is that this Hard Rock is in San
Diego's Gaslamp Quarter. It doesn't get much better.

Arriving in San Diego around noon, I
had plenty of time to check into my room and do a little
sight-seeing. Of course, “sightseeing” is Russ-speak for
“craft-beer drinking.” In my Sportage pre-trip research, I had
found a couple of craft breweries within a mile or so of the hotel. I
could have Uber'd to and from where I wanted to go, but after several
hours crammed in an airplane seat, I wanted to stretch my legs and
air out my road-weary posterior.

Navigating the historic avenues of the
Gaslamp Quarter and beyond, I hiked the mile or so to Monkey Paw
Brewery. Monkey Paw won't earn any kudos for its décor, but I give
it high marks for its beers. As a taste of its wares, I chose a
Julie's Bizzaro Carrot Cake Stout. “Yum” pretty well sums it up.
With that under my belt, I hoofed it back to the Hard Rock.

Kia scheduled dinner that first evening
at a eatery a few blocks from the hotel. We were presented with the
option of walking or riding in a Pedicab. For the uninitiated, a
Pedicab is a human-propelled rickshaw. Think of it as a tricycle with
a large backseat. A buddy of mine and I hopped on the first one in
line – it's always good to be in the first wave of journalists,
whose credo is “drink free or die” that arrives at cocktail hour.
We thought we would be the first to belly up to the bar. Ha!

"89" apparently refers to her weight soaking wet.

Alas, we failed to notice the human
engine on our Pedicab was a 90ish-pound woman who probably struggles to
manhandle a bag of groceries up two flights of stairs. We represented
nearly 400 pounds of combined cargo. This woman didn't stand a
chance. As Pedicabs loaded with our colleagues raced by, my buddy and
I could barely hear one another over our driver's wheezing and
sobbing. We did arrive before the end of the cocktail hour, but were
relegated to the outer fringes of our cohorts packed against the bar.
I suspect our driver didn't fare as well, probably winding up in an
emergency room somewhere.

My concentration level at these presentations is astounding.

Our first order of business the
following day was to attend a 90-or-so-minute presentation of all
things Sportage. Salted among the avalanche of information were
tidbits like, Kia ranked No. 2 in JD Power's 2015 Initial Quality
Survey and was ranked No. 6 in reliability by Consumer Reports.
We also learned that the new Sportage is the widest CUV in its
segment and that its two engines for 2017 are heavily revised
versions of last year's powerplants.

Here are a few other gems you might
want to know about the 2017 Sportage: Entry into Sportage begins at
$22,990 for the LX. There are also EX and SX Turbo grades. Even the
LX version comes standard with Kia's new UVO3, featuring Android
Auto, Apple CarPlay, 14 telematics services and 8 GB of music
storage.

We drove both front- and
all-wheel-drive versions of the top-end SX Turbo during our romp
around Southern California. We rocked out to the sounds of the
eight-speaker Harman Kardon surround-sound system as we negotiated
the hills and curves of our drive route. Although we were surprised
our Sportage with its 2-liter turbo is only rated by the EPA at 21
mpg in combined driving, my driving partner and I were impressed with
its handling and aggressive acceleration. Not to mention the interior
fit and finish.

The SX comes right out of the box
crammed full of goodies, such as push-button start, leather seating,
heated and ventilated front seats, dual-zone auto climate control,
Smart hands-free power liftgate, panoramic sunroof, front/rear
parking assist, autonomous emergency braking and a lot more. Our AWD
SX totaled out with delivery fee at $34,895.

After the formal drive, we took
advantage of the SX's navigation system to guide us to the Belching
Beaver Brewery's auxiliary tasting room a few miles from the Hard
Rock. I stocked up on two bottles each of its Peanut Butter Milk
Stout and its regular Milk Stout.

Kia always spices up the drive
experience with a contest of one sort or another. This event's
contest was tailored more toward the social media crowd, requiring a
video of each driving team pantomiming to some song as it played on
the Harmon Kardon system. In the spirit of participation, my driving
partner and I threw together a three-minute video. Knowing we didn't
stand a snowball's chance of winning, or even collecting my usual
“Honorable Mention,” umm, mention, we didn't put a lot of effort
into this thing. Besides, thinking the contest was going to be the
karaoke performance scheduled after that evening's dinner, I had
invested a fair amount of time working on one of the songs from the
playlist we were e-mailed a couple of weeks earlier. I wasn't in the
mood to spend much time on this video contest that I knew we couldn't
win.

I won't go into detail about the video
other than to say we did it to Ray Wylie Hubbard's “We're From
Texas.” There is actually a bit more to the title, but you can look
it up. Needless to say, this was the first Kia contest in a couple of
years that I didn't at least get an honorable mention. My fans were
crestfallen. I was a little misty myself.

The blow was even greater when we got
to the karaoke portion of the night and the song I had rehearsed and
choreographed wasn't on the final play list. What? Kia had actually
brought in a band specializing in karaoke. Yep, it was live music
backing up the amateur vocals. Cool? You bet.

Somewhere between sending out the
original list and the actual event, someone replaced some of the
songs; mine among them. Drat, I had even taught myself to moonwalk.
It wasn't good, but I judged it good enough that people would figure
out what I was trying to do. I had also rewritten some of the lyrics.
I wound up not performing at all. After all, it wasn't the contest,
right? I didn't feel honor bound to participate. It was a great evening of entertainment, however.

I may have been a bit disappointed in
the contest/karaoke elements of the Sportage event, but I am smitten
by the crossover itself. Kia continues to amp up the quality and
performance of its vehicles. Sportage will do well.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

I'm not the kind of guy who deludes
himself into thinking he knows a lot about everything. I clearly
don't know much about anything and, at my age, that's not likely to
change. In the words of Dirty Harry Callahan: “A man's got to know
his limitations.”

I am in awe of a handful of my
auto-media colleagues who can glance at a 40-, 50- or 60-year-old car
and rattle off its statistics. One such colleague, long-time pal and
former Washington Times editor Vern Parker can look at a 1956
Hudson Hornet – or just about any other car assembled between 1920
and 1980 – sitting in a museum, a driveway or barn and tell you
that the taillights aren't stock. I've seen him do it.

The only reason I can remember what I
had for breakfast this morning is that I almost always have the same
thing: a protein bar. There's no way I can look at a 1955 Chevy Bel
Air and opine that the wheel covers are from a '54. I'd be as likely
to accurately explain string theory. “Uh, it's a theory about, um,
strings.”

It's in this spirit of self awareness
that I added a new coffee table book to my collection. Published by
Motorbooks, it's titled, American Muscle Cars and costs $32.15 on Amazon. Although it
primarily covers, what author Darwin Holmstrom calls, the classic
muscle car era, spanning the ten-year period from 1964 to 1974, AMC
also provides some historic context for the phenomenon, as well as
the series of technological developments that made muscle cars
possible.

Graduating high school at nearly the
center point of Holmstrom's classic muscle car era, I have an
enduring affection for those smaller cars with big-honking V8s. That
I can't rattle off from memory statistics or years of production,
doesn't diminish my enthusiasm for those vintage GTOs, Cudas and
Challengers.

Illustrated with some brilliant
photography from Tom Glatch, AMC is brimming with historical
and anecdotal information. Holmstrom's writing style is as
entertaining as a Dave Barry column and as comfortable as an old pair
of Hush Puppies. Readable? You bet.

As a freelance journalist, I am always
on the lookout for source material for the articles and stories I am
assigned. AMC now plugs the glaring muscle-car gap that was in
my home library. The comprehensive index is a Who's Who and a what's
what of not only the muscle car period, but also for the pre-and
post-periods.

Full disclosure: I haven't read it
cover to cover, but certainly intend to. I have cherry picked
a couple of chapters to write this post, finding them extremely
readable, as well as rich in information.

My guess, though, anyone who is truly a
muscle-car fan, will find AMC difficult to put down. Whether,
like me, your library is absent a solid muscle-car tome, or you
already have a book or two on the subject, American Muscle Cars
will prove to be a valuable addition to your collection.

My 4-1-1

I began covering the automotive industry in 1986, when I parlayed my position as a retail sales rep into helping conceptualize and establish a stand-alone automotive section for the Boca Raton News a Knight-Ridder newspaper in South Florida. In 1995 I moved to the Palm Beach Post to help develop its bi-weekly automotive pages. Leaving there in 2000, I freelanced car reviews to a variety of publications before assuming a senior editor position at AMI Autoworld magazine in 2001. While at AMI I helped launch NOPI Street Performance Compact magazine and was appointed its managing editor. I have been freelancing since leaving AMI in 2004. My regular outlets have included Hispanic Magazine, the Miami Herald, the Washington Times, the Journal-Register Newspapers, AAA Go magazine, MyCarData.com, Automotive Metrics, AutoTrader, Bankrate.com and Interest.com.

In addition to freelancing automotive reviews, from 1991 until 2001 I was supervising producer of the syndicated television series Discover America.